I'll be there late Friday night - Monday late afternoon, and would love to meet folks, talk shop, imbibe.

On AIM: ianwrootslab; on gtalk: iwilker. 

-- Ian

Cross-posted from my blog.]

On of the hats I wear now for my chief client  is new-media editor of OnEarth Magazine. For the last six months, OnEarth has been putting out a podcast — 28 episodes so far, with everything from free-flowing interviews to radio-worthy feature stories to poetry readings. It’s really good content — the people who’re making the episodes are doing great work, and they deserve a big, healthy pool of listeners.

I've been asked to come up with ROI metrics for a grant proposal that includes a major long-haul, long-view social-web initiative, involving:

• Enterprise-wide blogging program for staff policy experts
• Enterprise-wide initiative to train staff in use of social-networking tools of various kinds -- to bring staff online in a robust way, so that we are able to carry on many more simultaneous, varied conversations, build tighter relationships with constituents, and participate broadly in the live web.
• effort to establish beachheads in external social-web communities -- in Flickr, MySpace, Upcoming.org, Digg.com, YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on. Focus would be not so much on putting institutional or campaign-related profiles in these contexts, as getting staff -- actual human beings, instead of a billboard -- participating in these communities.
• Major effort to enlist constituents as primary messengers -- give them widgets, blogs, content-distribution tools, and so on, let them know their efforts to spread the word and lend us whatever they have to give -- time, creativity, whatever -- is critical to advancing my organization's mission.

What we really want to do is create passionate users -- nurture and develop "constituent evangelists."

Just registered, after visiting net2 site for several months. Every time I visit, it seems there's a new and more compelling feel to the site -- great job, folks! If at all possible I will be at the conference in May.

As for me: I do online strategery and content development for NRDC, and am evangelizing social computing/media models within the institution. My nascent blog is roots.lab, and as I write this I'm sitting in an Austin, TX conference room for SXSWi. Should anybody here from net2 read this before end of day on Monday 3/13, I'd love to meet some of you.